Shadow of Victory - eARC (49 page)

And then go stand in a shower for the next three days.

“You know I’ve passed that observation of yours along,” he told her now. “And I sympathize. But I have to admit, I was a stronger supporter of the notion before I inherited Isabel’s chair and realized how really effective you are over there.” She made a face, and he patted her ankle. “No, I mean it! You are effective. And, while I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, I doubt you’re going to have to put up with it a lot longer.” Her eyes narrowed, and he nodded. “We’re definitely moving into the end game.”

“Thank God,” she said. Then her nostrils flared, and she leaned back, bracing herself with her hands on the desk behind her. “I’m not sure how that endgame’s going to work out, though. Especially if van der Leur’s suggestions wind up bearing fruit in Old Chicago.”

“And those suggestions were—?”

“Well, the general anti-Manty groundswell’s building nicely. Of course, we could pretty much count on van der Leur to want Manticore burned to the ground, but she and some of the others—including my own dear Immacolata!—are picking up rumors of growing unrest in the Verge. And they’re leaping to the conclusion that Manticore must be the one squirting the hydrogen. But they also seem to feel the SLN isn’t taking things seriously enough. From what van der Leur said, Volkhart Kalokainos and his father plan on turning up the pressure on Kolokoltsov and the other Mandarins to increase Frontier Fleet’s presence in the Verge in general and in the trouble spots in particular.”

“Really?” Chernyshev chuckled “And how do they plan to convince Frontier Fleet captains—those who have working brains, of which there are more in Frontier Fleet than Battle Fleet—to rush in where Crandall chose to tread?”

“By offering the Sollies Technodyne’s second-generation improved shipkillers,” she told him, and he stopped smiling.

“The second-generation birds?” he said with the air of a man making certain he’d heard correctly.

“That’s what she said, and Wirschim and Tuero both seemed to know exactly what she was talking about.”

“I see.”

Chernyshev frowned as he contemplated the idea. Lucinde didn’t know about Massimo Filareta’s orders to attack the Manticore Binary System. Nor did she know about the first-generation Technodyne shipkillers with which his ships had been supplied. Shipboard ordnance wasn’t Rufino Chernyshev’s strong point, either, and from everything he’d learned, even the best of Technodyne’s new hardware remained markedly inferior to the Manties’. But the second-generation weapons were essentially identical in performance to the Mesan Alignment Navy’s current shipkillers. The idea of handing them to the Sollies, giving the Manties a good look at them before they had to deal with any MAN units, might not strike the people in charge of the Alignment’s naval posture as a good idea.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t see a way to stop van der Leur and the others. As Lucinde had just said, they didn’t know anything about Operation Janus. If they had known, they’d have been as opposed to it—for their own perfectly logical reasons—as the SLN or the Manties, and if they did offer the League a substantially upgraded missile capability, the Mandarins might well jump at it.

And if they do start beefing up the Frontier Fleet presence in the Verge, they get a lot more likely to catch one of our people wandering around between resistance movements. That could be…unfortunate.

“Well,” he said finally, giving her foot one last caress and removing it from his lap, “that’s interesting. Might even work, although I doubt the Sollies will like what the Manties do to them even if they do get their hands on Technodyne’s new goodies. You did good, Lucinde—again. But then, you always do.”

“Damn straight,” she told him, slipping her shoe back on with a smile. “And my reward for that is your taking me to dinner at Chez Umberto’s. After which,” her smile grew positively sultry, “I may have a little reward for you, as well.”

Chapter Forty-Four

“…so, as soon as we had Carolyn and Argonaut’s people off Shona Station, we withdrew our own people,” Captain Jacob Zavala said, sitting across the table in HMS Artemis’ flag briefing room from Michelle Henke. “Lieutenant Hearns executed that whole part of the business extremely well, Milady. Her Lieutenant Gutierrez ran the nuts and bolts, but she was the one who put it together and made it work. I’ve written a letter of commendation I’d like to go into her permanent personnel file.”

“Append it to your formal report and I’ll see to it that it does,” she told him.

“Thank you, Milady. The truth is, all my people did well. The one thing I truly regret is the destruction of Vice Admiral Dubroskaya’s battlecruisers.” The small captain’s face turned grim, his eyes dark. “I should have launched a demonstration salvo, like Captain Ivanov in Zunker.”

“From what you’ve already told me, Jacob, that’s clearly a case of being wise—and unjust to yourself—after the fact.” He looked at her, and she met his eyes levelly. “Three Rolands didn’t have the magazine capacity to fool around wasting rounds on ‘demonstrations,’ and you know it. When Governor Dueñas ‘quarantined’ our ships, he deliberately set up a confrontation just like this one, and Dubroskaya knew exactly what he was doing. Hell, she and her ships were the most important part of it, the thing that gave him the firepower to think he could pull it off! I’m not saying that should have earned her and so many of her people a death sentence, but I am saying it was other people’s decisions that set up everything that happened. I’ll go over the final report, of course, and Commander Adenauer and I will analyze your targeting decisions just as carefully as you could possibly want. But I’m already pretty sure what we’re going to find that without a better baseline for how well the new Mark 16s would perform against battlecruisers, your targeting decisions were entirely appropriate.”

She continued to hold his gaze until he nodded ever so slightly, although she suspected he didn’t fully agree with her. Not yet, at least. It was going to take some time for him to get past the feeling that all those deaths had been avoidable.

Well, of course they were avoidable, Mike! she told herself tartly. It’s just that none of the people who could’ve done the avoiding happened to be wearing Manticoran uniforms!

“Between the battlecruisers and the Gendarmerie troops on Shona Station, total Solarian casualties were about six thousand,” Zavala said. “No native Saltashan was even injured, as far as I know. Because the Governor refused all communication after we put our people aboard the station, I had to complete the negotiations to arrange our people’s extraction without any more violence with Lieutenant Governor Tiilikainen. I’ve included complete recordings of all our conversations in the final report. My impression is that if she’d been in charge from the start, none of this would’ve happened. She didn’t say so in so many words, of course—it was an official communication—but it’s pretty clear this was all Dueñas,’ brainstorm.”

“Pretty much what I assumed going in.” Michelle sat back in her chair. “I just wish he hadn’t been stupid enough to get so many people killed. And, Jacob, while you’re kicking yourself about Dubroskaya, remember you gave her every chance to be not-stupid, too.”

“Yes, Milady. At any rate, once we’d recovered the ships, Captain Chou decided to take Carolyn on to Montana. She should be arriving in another couple of weeks; she’s not one of the fast freighters serving the beef trade. With Lacoön shutting down the League, Captain Lyriazis decided to divert from Merge and Even Star, so he took Argonaut to Lynx, heading back to Manticore.”

“Good, Jacob. Very good. Unless I find something totally bizarre in your final report, I’ll be endorsing your actions with my strongest approval when I forward my own report to Admiral Khumalo and Baroness Medusa. From everything I’ve seen so far, you and all your people performed brilliantly.”

“We tried, anyway, Milady,” he acknowledged.

“Which was exactly what I expected out of you when I sent you,” she said, rising from her chair. He followed suit, and she walked him to the briefing room door. “I think your people are entitled to a little leave,” she continued, “and there are some really good restaurants here in Montana. Why don’t you see about letting them sample some of them?”

“I think that would be a wonderful idea Milady,” he replied with a smile.

“Good! And try one or two of them yourself.”

“Of course, Milady.”

He came briefly to attention, then stepped through the briefing room door to the midshipwoman waiting to escort him back to the boat bay. Michelle smiled after him for a moment, then returned to her chair and frowned thoughtfully.

As she’d told Zavala, she couldn’t blame anyone besides Damián Dueñas, Vice Admiral Oxana Dubroskaya, and Major John Pole for the death toll in Saltash. Not that she expected the Sollies to see it that way. On the other hand, she was all done worrying about how Sollies reacted to anything. If an OFS system governor impounded Manticoran merchant vessels—and their crews—and refused to release them, then the Solarian League was just going to have to live with the consequences. And given the RMN’s record on commerce protection, Dueñas damned well should’ve known what would happen.

Still, she reflected, you could’ve sent something a little more impressive than three destroyers, Mike. You know how arrogant Sollies are. Maybe if you’d sent Michael’s battlecruisers—or even Terekhov’s cruisers—Dubroskaya would’ve been smart enough to back down before she got herself and so many other people killed.

She thought about that for another moment, then shrugged. There were always the “could’ves” and “should’ves” after anybody got killed, and like she’d told Zavala, the ultimate responsibility for those deaths lay with the people who’d been stupid enough to manufacture the incident in the first place.

She nodded, and then smiled slightly. She’d come to know Sir Aivars Terekhov much better since his return to the Talbott Quadrant. She understood exactly why so many people thought so highly of him—not just out here, but back home—and he and her other squadron commanders were due to dine with her this evening aboard her flagship.

He’ll be proud enough of young Abigail to bust his buttons, she thought, using one of her mother’s favorite archaisms. Now, what’s the best way to tease him about how well another of “his girls” has done? She snorted. Maybe I should have Gwen screen Zavala and tell him to join us and bring his officers?

She grinned impishly and reached out to punch Lieutenant Archer’s combination into her com.

* * *

“It’s time,” Tomasz Szponder said, sitting back from the table, coffee cup in hand.

“Are you certain of that?” Jarosław Kotarski leaned forward, left elbow propped on the arm of his chair, and an index finger stroked his mustache. “We’ve barely begun the real prep work, Tomasz.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Szponder shook his head. “What I meant is that it’s time for us to start thinking about actual strategies. Active strategies.”

“What sort of ‘active strategies’?” Grażyna Kotarska, Jarosław’s wife asked.

She was a small but sturdy woman, with short brown hair, and just as much a revolutionary as her husband. Unlike him, though, she was still employed by the Włocławek Department of Education…as a kindergarten teacher, where her superiors probably figured she couldn’t do much damage. At the moment, she and Tomek Nowak had been stacking dessert plates to clear the table, and she cocked her head and fixed Szponder with a bright, demanding eye.

“Oh, I’m not planning on blood in the streets tomorrow, Szytylet.” Szponder used her KWM codename with a crooked smile. “But friend Firebrand’s demonstrated his bona fides pretty conclusively. So now that we know we really do have that sort of support, we need to start thinking about how to use it.”

“But not tomorrow,” Kotarski said, sitting straight again and nodding in approval.

“No, not tomorrow, Jarosław,” Szponder reassured him. “Tomek and I have been kicking around numbers for a while now. Based on the two shipments Firebrand’s gotten through to us, and assuming he makes his projected future delivery schedule, we’d have enough weapons—military-grade weapons—to begin a guerrilla campaign in two or three T-months. But we’re all agreed that isn’t the way we want to go.”

He looked around the Kotarski table again. His own wife, Grażyna, was at the opera tonight. Aside from her, the people around that table were effectively the entire central cell of the Krucjata Wolności Myśli, and he saw agreement in every face.

He knew all of them would support exactly that sort of a campaign…if it was the only alternative to admitting defeat and letting people like Hieronim Mazur and Agnieszka Krzywicka continue crushing the Włocławekan people. Yet despite the enormous dissatisfaction with the Ruch Odnowy Narodowej and—especially—the Stowarzyszenie Eksporterów Owoców Morza, the preponderance of firepower would have been overwhelmingly on the side of Justyna Pokriefke’s BBP and General Sosabowska’s SZW. Not even Firebrand’s weapons deliveries could hope to change that, simply because of the size of the security forces.

That was why the KWM’s original strategy had focused on education, on attempting to “grow” that sense of dissatisfaction into something which might produce enough pressure to force at least limited reforms without “blood in the streets.” Unfortunately, events since the Lądowisko airbus shoot-down had amply demonstrated that that wasn’t going to happen.

There’d been a dozen demonstrations—two of which had degenerated into outright riots—once the hacked version of the air-traffic control records had become general knowledge. At first, Pokriefke’s Biuro Bezpieczeństwa i Prawdy seemed to have tried to contain things without bloodshed, but perhaps the KWM had done its work too well. Or perhaps it was simply the RON’s chance to discover how extraordinarily difficult it was for any repressive regime to allow “just a little” protest.

Whatever the cause, the demonstrations’ size had grown swiftly and the demonstrators’ demands had begun to reach beyond accountability for the murder of children. They’d begun to reach into the system which could allow the murder of children…and then cover it up. That was the point at which the BBP had called out the riot battalions and the czarne kurtki had started making examples. And that was the point at which the demonstrators had responded with riots in Lądowisko which had lasted for over two days, in the wake of which martial law had been declared not just in the capital, but in every major city, and those who spoke their minds too rashly had started…disappearing.

Tomasz Szponder was coldly and bitterly certain none of those vanished citizens would ever be seen again. And if the RON and Oligarchia were prepared to go that far, the possibility of peaceful reform no longer existed…if it ever truly had. That was precisely why he’d finally started stockpiling weapons.

But non-peaceful reform carried its own grim imperatives, and despite the KWM’s preliminary work, it would take T-months—probably T-years—to build a guerrilla movement with a genuine chance of success. While they were doing that building, they’d almost certainly come to the KWM’s attention. In fact, the weapons caches they’d already established significantly increased the odds of that happening, even in the relatively short term. And even if they somehow produced that kind of movement, they’d still get a lot of people killed…and offer Mazur and Krzywicka the perfect pretext to call in OFS. Neither of them would really want to do that, because they knew how the Solly transstellars would move in as soon as they let OFS in the door, but they’d a hell of a lot rather see everybody else in the star system become Solarian helots than lose everything in the wake of a successful revolution.

Especially as long as they got to be the slaves’ overseers.

Nor would it take long for OFS and Frontier Fleet to respond if they did send for help. Thanks to the Włocławek-Sarduchi warp bridge, Włocławek was little more than a week away from the Frontier Fleet naval base in the Warner System, which also happened to be the location of an OFS sector HQ.

“The thing is,” he continued, “now that the Manties have agreed to provide naval support, we’ve actually got a chance even if Mazur and Krzywicka whistle up the Sollies. We’d have to coordinate carefully, but we have the com channel ‘Firebrand’ set up for us.”

“‘Coordinate’ what, Tomasz?” Kotarski asked with a frown. “It sounds like you have something specific in mind.”

“I do.” Szponder sipped coffee, then lowered the cup and set it very precisely on the table in front of him.

“Tomek and I have been looking at this from the moment Firebrand turned up, even before Manticore delivered the first arms shipment. We haven’t said anything about it, both for security reasons and because until we had proof we can rely on Manticore, what we’ve been thinking about would’ve been insane. Now, though, we might actually be able to pull it off.”

“Pull what off?” Grażyna asked softly. She sank back into her chair, leaning forward and folding her arms on the table while she looked intently into Szponder’s face, and there was a strange little smile on her face. “What have the two of you been hatching?” She shook her head. “I’ve thought for weeks now you were up to something!”

“Guilty,” Tomek acknowledged with a smile of his own—one that bordered on a grin—then twitched his head in Szponder’s direction. “Although, to be fair, it was mostly his idea. I only got behind and pushed because I liked it so much!”

“If it’s something that appeals to Tomek,” Kotarski said dryly, “it fills me with dread.”

“Oh, it’s not that bad,” Szponder said. “But if we don’t want a guerrilla war, and if we don’t want to degenerate into nothing more than terrorists, our only option is a coup. And if Tomek and I are right, and assuming I get confirmation from the Manticorans that we can have naval support here in Włocławek when we need it, I think we just may have come up with a way to make a coup work.

* * *

“Christ!” Michael Breitbach muttered, staring at the HD.

The System Information and News Service’s camera-drones circled over the boulevard between the O’Sullivan Tower and Freedom Park as the Scorpion light tanks in Presidential Guard colors moved in, and the live feed wasn’t cutting away to the sort of canned fluff it normally used to sweep unpleasant events under the rug. SINS reported exactly what President Lombroso wanted reported, and what Lombroso and General Olivia Yardley obviously wanted at this moment was for the citizens of Mobius to understand that anyone who got too uppity was asking not simply for a truncheon to the head but a pulser dart to the brain.